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The Encyclopedia of Horology

Watch family · Style & purpose

Mystery Watches

Needs research

Watches designed so the hands appear to move with no visible connection to a movement, following the same illusionist principle as mystery clocks, applied to a much smaller wrist-worn case.

Movement & mechanism

  • Hands mounted on a transparent disc geared invisibly at its rim, exactly as in mystery clocks, rather than from a visible central arbor
  • Movement and true drive point concealed within the case or dial structure
  • Requires very precise construction given the far smaller scale than a mystery clock

Identification

  • A dial with no visible connection between the centre and the hands
  • Often marketed explicitly by maker name as a 'mystery' model

Terminology

  • Mystery dial — as in mystery clocks, a dial geared at its rim rather than centre

Known variations

  • Mystery dial wristwatch
  • Mystery dial pocket-to-wrist transitional pieces

Pocket-watch ancestry

The mystery-dial principle was developed for clocks (and to a lesser extent pocket watches) before being adapted, with considerable additional miniaturisation difficulty, to the wristwatch format.

Collecting notes

A niche, technically demanding style watched for by specialist collectors interested in mechanical novelty rather than complication in the conventional sense.

Related photographs

Farcot and Carrier-Belleuse Conical Mystery Clock
Farcot and Carrier-Belleuse Conical Mystery Clock — Rauantiques, CC BY-SA 4.0. Wikimedia Commons file page
Mystery clock - Cartier (39600552471)
Mystery clock - Cartier (39600552471) — Tim Evanson from Cleveland Heights, Ohio, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0. Wikimedia Commons file page

No confidently matched photograph of this subject has been found yet. These photographs show a closely related record, and are not examples of the type described on this page.

Sources & references

  1. General decorative watch literature; detailed manufacturer histories of wrist-format mystery watches are not yet compiled here.

Where sources disagree, the disagreement is stated rather than resolved silently.